US Grid Operator PJM Proposes Forcing Data Center Off Grid During Emergencies (reuters.com) 71
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: PJM Interconnection, the biggest U.S. grid operator, proposed on Thursday a new framework that would force data centers to use back-up generators when electricity supply on the grid approaches dangerously low levels. The grid operator's proposal dovetails with President Donald Trump's Ratepayer Protection Pledge, a non-binding initiative to protect residential customers from getting saddled with costs related to data center power consumption, PJM said.
A new emergency procedure would notify utilities to reduce or transfer the electricity demand from data centers and other large power users ahead of any action that would shut off traditional consumers such as households. PJM said it does not, however, currently have the authority to curtail power to those sites and would require the cooperation of individual state governments.
PJM manages the electricity for 67 million people in a territory that stretches from Washington, D.C. to Chicago. Its proposal highlights a growing tension between the rapid expansion of data centers and the ability of the nation's power grid to keep up. If PJM cannot close its supply gap, millions of residents and businesses face an increased risk of blackouts, and the cost of new generation could be passed on to other power consumers. At its recent capacity auction, PJM hit its $325-per-megawatt-day price cap but still came up about 6.8 GW short of its projected reliability needs.
With rapidly expanding data centers adding pressure to the grid, PJM has also proposed creating a registry to track their locations and power consumption.
A new emergency procedure would notify utilities to reduce or transfer the electricity demand from data centers and other large power users ahead of any action that would shut off traditional consumers such as households. PJM said it does not, however, currently have the authority to curtail power to those sites and would require the cooperation of individual state governments.
PJM manages the electricity for 67 million people in a territory that stretches from Washington, D.C. to Chicago. Its proposal highlights a growing tension between the rapid expansion of data centers and the ability of the nation's power grid to keep up. If PJM cannot close its supply gap, millions of residents and businesses face an increased risk of blackouts, and the cost of new generation could be passed on to other power consumers. At its recent capacity auction, PJM hit its $325-per-megawatt-day price cap but still came up about 6.8 GW short of its projected reliability needs.
With rapidly expanding data centers adding pressure to the grid, PJM has also proposed creating a registry to track their locations and power consumption.
Datacenters should be net generators (Score:2)
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The obvious solution here is to run the data centers in reverse. Basically feed them long winded manipulative slop, and have them convert it into the original art. This will mean the centers will then start generating power instead of using it up.
It's so obvious I can't believe nobody's thought of it before. We could probably solve global warming if we did this.
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Maybe we should demand the tech brahs pay for home solar and storage.
Careful... (Score:1)
You turn off a data center during emergencies and find it was the one responsible for the 911 system, its going to be a bad day.
Re:Careful... (Score:5, Insightful)
If the 911 system is failing because it's power gets cut, then you need to start imprisoning people, starting from the installation engineer, and, if he has an excuse ("I followed the plan") working up through the design engineer ("my manager told me to cut the backup system") and engineering manager ("I got it three times in writing and here's a video that there's no budget for a backup system") until the members of the board are sitting in Barlinnie and begging to be sent to Alcatraz.
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Sheesh, whose side are you on?
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Explain why your E911 service requires an AI datacenter at all? Shouldn't that be one of those important things that are left to humans?
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Explain why your E911 service requires an AI datacenter at all? Shouldn't that be one of those important things that are left to humans?
In literally every other case, we're being told that humans make errors and are far too emotional to do things correctly, and we must trust the machines to do better. I can't see why the computer god believers will feel any differently about the 911 system. Even if that argument makes my skin crawl.
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I'd rather have a human cook my food and dispatch the correct emergency vehicle for the situation.
I'm of the opinion that we never needed the AI in the first place.
Will AI be able to clearly understand that your wife is having a baby even though you have a thicccc Southern accent, or will it send restraints and a strait jacket?
Stuff like this is how riots start ("they wouldn't send anyone for my cousin, Mookie, 'cause he's black", or it sends the ambulance to 151 2nd St, while you live at 251 1st St, or it
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I'd rather have a human cook my food and dispatch the correct emergency vehicle for the situation. I'm of the opinion that we never needed the AI in the first place. Will AI be able to clearly understand that your wife is having a baby even though you have a thicccc Southern accent, or will it send restraints and a strait jacket?
Stuff like this is how riots start ("they wouldn't send anyone for my cousin, Mookie, 'cause he's black", or it sends the ambulance to 151 2nd St, while you live at 251 1st St, or it doesn't answer any calls because it was busy downloading an update and rebooting).
Well, of course we don't need the AI for these types of situations. But we're in a world where profit matters, and saving money even for required services matters just as much. So, having a computer instead of a human, if it offers even pennies per year of savings, will be touted as a huge win by the people in charge of these things. Who cares if it fucks up for a few of us plebes? As long as there's always an option for the folks with the money and the power to get good services, it certainly won't matter
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There are already 911 systems using AI [reddit.com]. The trend will accelerate quickly, until there's enough of a death toll to get some politicians unelected.
Jailing your neighbor (Score:2)
I guarantee you if that happens once, nobody with a title above manager will ever have heard of it. "Nine one what?"
Re:Jailing your neighbor (Score:4, Interesting)
That is a recipe for throwing a bunch of cable guys in prison.
I guarantee you if that happens once, nobody with a title above manager will ever have heard of it. "Nine one what?"
Things like 911 systems, paid for with public money, do not happen without extensive written records of who did what. Because without that, there's no equipment to install because there's no money to buy it. And tampering with that system results in prison sentences [oc.gov]. Not as often as it should, but it certainly happens.
Re: Careful... (Score:2)
Backup power is easy... Backup AI can be hard, if you've been stupid enough to make your system dependent on these things.
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Backup power is easy... Backup AI can be hard, if you've been stupid enough to make your system dependent on these things.
Sure. Right now I'd consider that a 911 system that can't work when the AI is down would be criminal. Presumably in future people will have AI redundancy (which int this case I guess means distributed incident information and LLMs) fully tested and working acceptably.
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Corporations are good at diluting responsibility enough to prevent anyone being held accountable. Each individual will have a reasonable excuse and only a small part of the blame.
What we need is corporate punishment. In Japan they can force a corporation stop doing business for a number of days or even months.
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Corporations are good at diluting responsibility enough to prevent anyone being held accountable. Each individual will have a reasonable excuse and only a small part of the blame.
What we need is corporate punishment. In Japan they can force a corporation stop doing business for a number of days or even months.
Interesting. I assume they aren't allowed to stop ongoing service responsibilities to existing customers? Does that depend?
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I think it's pretty severe, as in they can only argue to not stop certain critical things that would be catastrophic for them or innocent customers.
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You turn off a data center during emergencies and find it was the one responsible for the 911 system, its going to be a bad day.
Yeah, whether it's true or not, every data center in the nation is going to be rated as necessary emergency services to get around any attempt to pull them off-grid during emergencies. This is creating a small hurdle that will require some extra doo-dad pizzazz to get around at most.
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> Surely you have a backup plan?
I do have a backup plan. And don't call me Shirley.
Re:Careful... (Score:5, Insightful)
You turn off a data center during emergencies and find it was the one responsible for the 911 system, its going to be a bad day.
That's a design and implementation issue. If the data center doesn't have a backup battery or generator and they committed to "five nines" availability, then they are at fault. If they didn't commit to "five nines" availability, but 911 treated at such, then that is a problem on the 911 system.
Emergency systems should be able to operate in a "dumb mode" and in the absence of grid power. If that means throwing more humans to support the situation, then so be it. In the end these systems are meant to be serving humans and not the other way around.
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Your post seems to think the people in charge care about people. We know better. The 99% of us are literally allowed to live to serve the rich. If robotics and AI take off enough, we'll see how long that last for.
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Emergency systems should be able to operate in a "dumb mode" and in the absence of grid power. If that means throwing more humans to support the situation, then so be it. In the end these systems are meant to be serving humans and not the other way around.
That is the ideal. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world. Most of our emergency systems are being run by private enterprise. Which means they are for-profit. Which also means they are for lowering costs. If it costs less to have less humans on-call for emergencies? We'll have less humans on-call for emergencies. This trend will continue until enough people die or are hurt to start affecting the political class during election cycles, meaning we'll have a nice two to four year window of destruction
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It doesn't have to be 911. "Emergency" here means "too many people running their air conditioners." So all the electronic payment terminals, cloud software, and the web goes down. And Netflix. People will love it.
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If it's an AI data center (which is generally what people are concerned about the massive growth of) responsible for 911, then you're going to have a bad day whether powered or not.
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That is the whole point though! The datacenters don't go offline. They have their own generating plant for backup power. Obviously that isn't going to be as efficent environmentally or cost wise compared to grid scale power generation.
However, it is similarly not efficent to scale the grid to handle corner case capacity situations like a transient switching failure or a plant needing to go offline for emergency maintenance all while maintaining current loads when there are whole bunch of loads that represen
Good timing! (Score:2)
For Sherrod Brown.
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wrong thread...
Some ideas: (Score:3)
0) It was once in Florida that commercial users who exceeded an agreed-upon load during certain hours were essentially fined for that, with that fine, increased rates, lasting up to a year. Many shopping malls in particular used onsite generators to run their A/C systems in very hot weather,. which both depleted their ice banks and, coincidentally, caused higher residential demand etc. Worth it to avoid the surcharges. Datacenters may want to invest in onsite generators to be used not just for backup and restoration, but for load shedding.
1) Datacenters may have to investigate negotiating with users for prioritized power use, which seems to me to be incredibly unlikely, but it has to be an option.
Put these both under the heading of resilience. Easier to sell.
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"commercial users who exceeded an agreed-upon load during certain hours were essentially fined for that"
Can you ask your favorite AI about Microsoft burning off energy in a Quincy datacenter to avoid a fine for not meeting contractual minimum usage requirements?
Re: Some ideas: (Score:2)
'load shedding'. 'service prioritization'.
How many ways are there to reduce power consumption in a statement, before turning off servers. Oh, wait, in addition to turning off servers...? Reduce the cloud population, reduce power, but reduce performance. What would the utilities be offering for responding to unsupported demand, even for an unplanned supply outage? I don't read a lot about these options. Even rejecting them.
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What if they're sitting on an oversupply so vast they forego as much as they generate, while selling you on a scarcity story that lines their pockets and allows them to bribe economists selling you the same scarcity story to give it academic credibility?
Copilot, what is 9Wa state) BPA's total potential generation capacity vs. actual?
"[...] Theoretical max: ~181 TWh/year; Actual: ~85 TWh/year; Rough âoeunused potentialâ: ~100 TWh/year [...]
Re: Some ideas: (Score:2)
I know how 'theoretical max' works. Without defending the utilities and generators, that's when everything they have is operating at maximum capacity. No maintenance, no fuel shortages, etc. different numbers for daylight and darkness where solar is included, calculating wind capacity is, shall we say, an art. You don't have to trust the generators, but their numbers are all ya got. Derate it as you feel necessary.
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How much does it cost BPA to divert water around the turbines, as opposed to running it through? If you stored the nighttime generation potential, where is the scarcity they keep (cynically) selling us?
Re: Some ideas: (Score:2)
If they build it they will use it. But do they want to use it? Hydro seems so very easy and simple, but impoundment caused problems in many places. Out west drought has lowered water levels almost to the point where generation must stop. Similar problems in Europe. Pumped storage needs a water source to pump. The engineering has to be done. Somehow nuclear seems to be overlooked too often. SMR, anyone?
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Datacentres could install batteries. They could be charged at off-peak times when energy is cheap, and by solar and even on-site wind turbines.
It's just cheaper to externalize the cost onto other consumers.
Out of the box (Score:2)
If you want this to happen, vote for me! I will make it all happen. Pinky swear!
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Being as I live in San Diego and get some of the highest sun count days in the country, kindly fuck off.
Re: Out of the box (Score:2)
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Your plan would have me working overtime 300 days a year. Just no. If I wanted that kind of job I'd already have one like that. About the only people I know that expect and presumably like it are truck drivers.
Of course, I suppose I could just move to Alaska or maybe even just Seattle. Tons of raining days and snow days in those locations, so I'd be on vacation all the time.
It doesn't really sound functional overall. Much like the growing datacenter issue. It's just not sustainable long term.
Re: Out of the box (Score:2)
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That's interesting about the geothermic power. I was under the impression (wrongly?) that it was a pretty constant energy source and basically a net zero kind of energy as well. Obviously also a very situational technology.
And yeah, sorry, ya hit a nerve. Long day and I would love a retreat to nature.
Or just pollute all the time like Musk does (Score:4, Informative)
Needless to say, the EPA has not done anything about this even with its own decision of illegality.
No need to switch to generators when you can use them from day one and not have to worry about doing anything under the current regime.
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Even if they don't pollute all the time, consider when a "power emergency" will be most likely. One common situation is when there is a stagnant heat dome sitting on the area forcing everyone to crank up their A/C.
Then the data centers will fire up their gas and diesel generators with short exhaust stacks, and with no wind all those fumes will just linger in the general vicinity.
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So do I have this right? Does air conditioning cause more heat domes, the solution to which is more air conditioning?
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It's not causation, but correlation. The times that the grid open goes down are during extremely hot weather, which is the same time AC is needed (which overloads the grid) and during extremely cold weather (same time electric heat is needed). Extreme weather is the problem, along with underspecked grids and CEOs/politicians who permit loads on the grid which we all know the grid cannot support.
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Did you just get whooshed, while Copilot saw the point?
"Air conditioning contributes to global warming through electricity consumption and refrigerant leakage, and globally it accounts for roughly 4% of total greenhouseâ'gas emissions today, rising to 8â"10% by midâ'century without efficiency improvements. In hot regions, AC can be one of the largest single drivers of peak electricity demand."
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Feel free to self-sacrifice yourself. I've already done my part. I'm not having kids. Your welcome. All you Western breeds that are bitching about climate change need to take a long hard look in the mirror because the most polluting thing you can do for the world is birth a Western baby that will pollute at the same level a typical Westerner does.
You wanna save the planet? Stop breeding.
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Can I plead that I was recently downvoted here into one-post-per-week territory for anti-natalist trolling? And that getting out in the mountains is my AC?
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Hey I didn't downvote ya. We are all free to our own opinions here.
Also, maybe your mountains are nice and cool but in Southwest Cali, not so much at the moment :)
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I care as much about the planet is our elected leaders. So yes, the AC is the solution. Feel free to virtue signal like the Europeans and die of heat stroke. I'll just use the AC and die of something else later.
Or rather, I'll starting walking to work, go vegan, etc, as soon as all the rich folk do. Since they are busy doubling down on living life, I see absolutely no reason to stop living life myself.
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Can you imagine if AC gave you headaches and made you think fuzzier than normal even, like me, so that napping in the shade outdoors (for best results find a mountain) is preferable on a heat dome day? Does the denial of my preferences (and the regular silencing of my attempts to defend them) allow passage of anti-camping and anti-van-life ordinances without drawing any protest from most voters like yourself, since you rarely ever hear from people like me, due to us getting modded into oblivion so frequentl
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I'd be fine with no camping ordinances or anti-van life so long as you did it outside of the city. Camping on someone's literally front sidewalk is just not acceptable. Dumping your waste down the storm drain is not acceptable. If you are a real camper, then you know the number one rule is leave the place as good if not better then when you arrived. Yet to see any "urban campers" follow that unwritten rule.
I'll even agree that if you are in a dry climate, then resting in the shade on a hot day can work pret
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It's not even just Musk (though he's the most brazen about it). All of these inhuman tech morons will happily throw the entire human race under the bus to make a dollar. Amazon is proposing a datacentre with 35 gas turbines which would make it the single largest source of CO2 in the USA, a country which is shifting back towards coal and already the largest CO2 emitter per capita in the west.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/0... [nytimes.com]
These tech companies are *literally the worst*, and that's in a world where coal, and
Mixing units again (Score:2)
"At its recent capacity auction, PJM hit its $325-per-megawatt-day price cap but still came up about 6.8 GW short of its projected reliability needs. "
There we are again, mixing units. megawat-day is a unit of energy, GW is a unit of power.
(I have never heard of megawatt-day before, but presumably it is 24 megawatt-hours)
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At least they're using units that we (the world) can recognize, and not something like tera-bald-eagles-power or something based on body parts of a random dude.
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They're not comparing $325-per-megawatt-day to 6.8 GW, they're evaluating PJM on two different criteria: price vs. peak instantaneous capacity.
The minimum generation capacity you need at your plants, and therefor your fixed costs, is a function of peak usage, but the minimum price per unit you need to earn to pay for that capacity is a function of average usage. What those numbers are saying is that their demand is peaky enough that they are out of capacity but low enough at other times that they can't make
So glad we cancelled all that off shore wind... (Score:1)
Notes (Score:3)
Just a couple of random notes about the practicality of this.
This is already happening (Score:2)
Datacenters near O'hare airport were directed to switch to generators during the recent heatwave so ComEd could maintain the load. The datacenters complied.
Everything not to install more power plants (Score:2)
Why not solve this at the supply side and add more power plants?
The industry is measured by one metric everywhere: power usage.
We used to gloat about ours. We show maps where South Korea is brilliant, and NK is pitch black in the night. And China is continuing this trend with massive expansion of nuclear power plants.
But here we are talking about rationing basic power to one of our largest growing industries.
"Are we taking crazy pills?"
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"Why not solve this at the supply side and add more power plants?"
And I mentioned elsewhere: the minimum generation capacity you need at your plants, and therefor your fixed costs, is a function of peak usage, but the minimum price per unit you need to earn to pay for that capacity is a function of average usage.
Building more capacity that is only needed for the peak will push up the average price you need to charge to break even. At some point your customers start cutting back on their average demand causi
Those Poor Power Companies (Score:2)
This would just benefit the power companies all around. They'd get the data center business, but when there's an emergency where they can't provide the required power, they could cut off the data centers, saving them from having to cut off the household power customers. See, they're fined if they have disruptions in service to residential customers and have to pay our SLAs to many commercial ones. So this change would save them from such loss of profits, while still giving them the lucrative contracts to su